Emerging strategies for Google AIOs in Travel Marketing

Google's AI Overviews (AIOs) are driving big changes in marketing by the travel, tourism and hospitality industries.

Because AIOs frequently result in "zero click searches" for travel services: Google responds directly to users' queries, bypassing any clickthroughs to vendor websites. And this drying-up of organic search traffic in turn increases competition raises the cost of paid search advertising campaigns. That plus aggressive bidding by OTAs has increased the marketing spend of travel companies by 20%-30% vs a year ago.

Right now in the heat of the holiday season, savvy travel marketers are reporting some successes resulting from:

• Authoritative content that supports EEAT
• More images and videos in content
• Focusing on mid- and bottom-funnel marketing while forgoing riskier top-of-funnel spend
• High-converting creative aimed at high-intent queries
• Staying constantly on top of negative organic keywords
• Strict bidding discipline to control return on ad spend in the face of rising costs per click
• More effective SEO, to maximize share of "free" clicks
• Targeted remarketing in support of customer retention

Comment: If you're wondering why, with AI driving travel sales, do we need Google at all? Keep in mind that all those AI tools are getting their data from Google's search index.

Ads Advisor seems to be a new/improved version of the Google Ads "Chat" feature.

According to Google, Ads Advisor understands your business context and can interpret your campaign data to recommend campaign improvements. It can also execute campaign changes that you approve, and can generate new creative - keywords, headlines, descriptions - based on your existing content and historical performance.

It learns from user behavior, so should become increasingly personalized over time.

While the tool is in beta, if your account is eligible to use it you will see the Ads Advisor icon as shown in the image above. Clicking that opens a chat panel where you can type in questions.

Ads Advisor is expected to be available to all English-language advertisers later this year.

Examples of things Ads Advisor can do:

• Produce campaign performance reports
• Explain reasons for performance changes
• Troubleshoot performance issues
• Troubleshoot Google Ads policy violations
• Help with identity verification issues
• Get billing support
• Provide campaign optimization suggestions
• Recommend/generate improved campaign assets
• Generate keywords
• Suggest new campaign ideas
• Generate reports
• Learn and help you with best practices for your account and market

Tips for using Ads Advisor:

• Use very specific prompts
• Communicate as with a human.
• Ads Advisor makes suggestions to guide conversations, which you can accept or counterpropose.

Caveats from Google:

• Ads Advisor needs a little time to formulate answers to questions.
• Images in generates come from your pages or are generated by AI.
• Ads Advisor may sometimes produce answers that are incorrect or irrelevant. Use the thumbs-up/thumbs-down buttons to give developers feedback.
• You are responsible for ensuring suggestions you get and accept are in fact accurate and relevant before implementing them in your Google Ads account.

What will initial experiences of users with Ads Advisor be? Stay tuned.

Google Expanding AI Mode Bookings to Hotels and Flights

After launching AI Mode bookings for restaurants, events and beauty and doctor appointments in October, Google has announced plans to add agentic bookings for hotels and flights.

The new booking experience is first being enabled for US Google AI Ultra subscribers

This new rollout will add Booking.com, Choice Hotels International, Expedia, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts to Google's list of travel booking partners that already includes OpenTable, Resy, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek and Booksy.

Also last month Google announced launch of a new agentic commerce solution with with PayPal, which followed the initiation of an Agent Payment Protocol in September.

Although Google hasn't yet announced full details of its new booking ecosystem, it's been announced that users will be able to choose booking partners, and that those partners will manage all transactions and bookings without Google itself being in the loop.

ChatGPT Adoption Increases Usage of Google Search

New Semrush research finds that adoption of ChatGPT by users rather than taking search share from Google instead expands both the overall number of search sessions and the number of Google search sessions.

Semrush compared 160 billion rows of US desktop clickstream data for 2 user groups between January 2024 and June 2025 to see how users' behavior changed after their first interaction with ChatGPT:

Study Group: US users who first used ChatGPT in 1Q2025 with no prior ChatGPT use

Control Group: Users who did not use ChatGPT at any time in 2024 or 2025

As you can see in the table above, while mean ChatGPT sessions per week rose from 0 to 5, mean Google search sessions increased also, by 20% from 10.5 to 12.6.

Trends in the same direction were found consistently among users who first adopted ChatGPT in January, February or March 2025. And Google search use by the control group remained stable throughout January, February and March.

Conclusions drawn by Semrush analysts are:

• ChatGPT is not replacing traditional search, but instead is expanding the ways in which people seek information.
• Users accept both ChatGPT and Google, and likely switch between them.
• Online exploration is expanding overall as new ways of reaching people with information are added.

Recommendations for marketers from Semrush:

• Keep investing in SEO because Google still works.
• Add AI SEO to your strategies, to complement traditional SEO.
• Monitor your market's channel mix periodically, because different audiences adopt AI search at different rates,

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Want to know more? Go here for an in-depth discussion of SEO.

Tests reveal that ChatGPT Plus is using Google's index as well as Bing as a source of answers to questions.

Recent tests by Abhishek Iyer and Backlinko provide evidence that ChatGPT Plus is using data from the Google search index.

Until now it has ben widely believed that, because Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, search results from ChatGPT Plus are coming exclusively from Bing. But these new tests - in which a made-up piece of information that was provided only to Google quickly appeared in ChatGPT Plus results - make it clear that ChatGPT Plus is using the Google search index.

The implication of that for businesses is: AI search is becoming dependent on Google's index, and if your pages don't rank there, ChatGPT Plus won't see them.

And, of course, neither will Google Gemini, the #2 provider of AI search.

Bottom line: it's now going to be doubly important for google to be able to crawl, index and understand your website, and find there good, clear answers to users' most relevant questions.

Go here for more on Maine search engine optimization.

https://x.com/distantgradient

https://backlinko.com/chatgpt-using-google-search